Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026): 4/5

"Psycho... but from the perspective of the shower curtain."

You may not leave a Jane Schoenbrun film loving what you saw but you do leave knowing someone is going to have their lives changed by the film. This film is going to have a long and interesting life. In the near future, some will find it to make too many big leaps of faith, and in many ways I think horror fans may come away the most disappointed. But if you surrender to the vision, there’s so much to enjoy. This is a great looking film, with a smart script that’s also very funny, and it’s all powered by a concoction of meta 80s teen slasher with a sprinkle of Sunset Boulevard seen through Schoenbrun’s characteristic queer lens. Oh and towering Gillian Anderson clearly relishing at her Southern belle/Norma Desmond vampiric turn? That's a yes for me. Also, as fandom becomes a nearly religious identity, Schoenbrun is exploring how fandom and identity shape each other and I love that for myself.

The Last House (Louis Leterrier, 2026): 2/5

Typical bullshit I've come to expect from Netflix. But at least Greta Lee was there?

Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937): 4/5

Requires some suspension of belief, but when it's so piercingly perceptive, who cares? Lubitsch mixes his patented light touch -- the social commentary about class with the various staff, especially on the trip to the racetrack; charming and witty banter between the love triangle of Maria/Angel (a typically mesmerizing Marlene Dietrich), her Diplomat husband Frederick (Herbert Marshall), and the starstruck Tony Halton (Melvyn Douglas) --with a remarkably astute depiction of the depths and layers of happiness, the challenges of marriage, and the swooning power of infatuation.

Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg, 2026): 3/5

A soft 3. It sometimes feels like a story that wants to be a drama but was forced into the mold of a thriller in order to occupy the summer box office seas. The problem a lot of new American blockbusters are repeatedly running into is that America now, from an outsider perspective, is completely devoid of empathy at the highest ranks of power. Perhaps Spielberg has finally given up on humanity sorting itself out and our last chance of redemption is how we respond to a hypothetical Disclosure Day. (Save us, ET!)

Also: that memorable shot of Fruit Loops falling in front of the camera like hailstones -- that had to be Spielberg or Kaminski's nod to Araki's Mysterious Skin right?? (Now there's a powerful story about childhood abduction.)

OK but we totally lost it when the bad guy Colin Firth, after spending his whole life fighting disclosure, just shrugs, sits down and says "Fuck it, I give up, disclose everything." I mean the guy had ONE JOB.

Evil Dead Burn (Sebastien Vanicek, 2026): 1/5

Dares to ask: what if evil men were evil?

Surprisingly awful with moments that approach genuinely incompetent filmmaking.

A Self-Induced Hallucination (Jane Schoenbrun, 2018): 3/5
2010-2015 YouTube was home to some of the most idiotic people to walk the earth.

Anyway, this is a much more effective way of surveying an internet phenomenon than any conventional talking head doc that I’ve seen. It’s sort of a video essay comprised of original YouTube content, but it feels more experimental and plays as impressionistic aggregate.


Swiss Family Robinson (Ken Annakin, 1960): 2.5/5
The type of Hollywood showboaty production of days gone by. Racism, misogyny, cruelty to animals, colonialism, toxic masculinity. It’s all here!


Young Washington (Jon Erwin, 2026): 0.5/5
George Washington: “What are we going to do Ben ”

Ben Franklin: “I don’t know George…” He pauses. “But whatever it is, we’ll do it together.”

And then they revolutioned… AMERICAN REVOLUTIONED!

Queen Bee (Ranald MacDougall, 1955): 3/5
People used to go to the movies to be terrified by Joan Crawford in this country.


rewatched Nine to Five (Colin Higgins, 1980): 3.5/5
In a time of downright diabolical evil, we have lost an angel. And we will not see her likes again. No one could embody everything great about this country like Dolly Rebecca Parton. And losing her now, when America is being engulfed by wanton cruelty, stings badly. So it seemed fitting to revisit this film, which became an improbable box office smash due to its casting of three formidable iconic women, its humorous tackling of serious gender and workplace issues, and of course Dolly’s monster hit song, perhaps the last great anthem of the worker’s plight this culture has produced. The plot is unhinged, but the monstrousness of Danny Coleman’s Franklin Hart is such that the farce is warranted. Watching this movie in the Trump Era is both dispiriting and also cathartic. But the film’s greatest pleasure may be in seeing Dolly almost steal the movie from brilliant and far more experienced actors.

RIP Dolly Rebecca Parton. 

BOOK NOOK

The Shipping News (Annie Proulx, 1996)
I love a book that takes place at the edge of civilization because it tends to make people act strangely, like they’re about to tip into barbarism at any moment. Such is the case with this book about a sad sack who ends up moving with his aunt to a tiny town in Newfoundland filled with some of the oddest balls you’ll come across in literature. Their struggles to barely keep it together are hysterical.